Deadpool 2 films action on location in Vancouver

Production was based at Mammoth Studios in the central Vancouver region of Burnaby. The facility offers three sound stages and has also recently hosted Shane Black’s upcoming sci-fi horror The Predator and War for the Planet of the Apes.

Deadpool 2 spent half its production schedule on stages and the remainder of its shoot days on location. The team’s biggest challenge was a key action sequence featuring an assault on a prison convoy, which was shot in the centre of Vancouver.

“The chase sequence included a lot of stunts, special effects rigs and explosions,” says Ann Goobie, the film’s location manager, in comments to KFTV. “The movement of the convoy truck was an undertaking in itself as it was 110 feet long and ten feet wide, and had to manoeuvre in narrow streets.

“We had to completely close off five blocks of two different downtown streets when filming this sequence for public and crew safety. This closure required 43 police officers and 98 production assistants, and was the largest closure for a film production that the city of Vancouver has ever allowed. We shot this sequence for seven days over the course of three weekends.”

A closed section of a psychiatric hospital became a mutant orphanage for the film’s superhero characters and a prison setting was built around the bones of an existing closed power plant.

Scenes set in the ‘X-Mansion’, recognisable to superhero fans as the home of Professor X in the main X-Men franchise, were filmed at a university building on nearby Vancouver Island.

“Another large challenge was crowd control when we were doing exterior filming,” Goobie tells KFTV.

“In our first week of the shoot, local news published information from our resident letters that told the public where we would be filming. This led to hundreds of people showing up at our sets and creating a public safety problem with people blocking sidewalks and streets around us.”

Vancouver is likely to have had a significant financial boost from the Deadpool 2 shoot. For the first movie, producers spent around CA$40m in the British Columbia city, but the figure for the sequel is likely to be higher as the budget for the new film was reportedly increased by some $50m.

British Columbia was Canada’s most popular production hub for international filming projects in 2016-17, according to a February report from the Canadian Media Producers Association.

See KFTV's production guide for more on filming in British Columbia.

Images: Joe Lederer/Twentieth Century Fox